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The iPod experience at Duke

Here’s a couple of kind of fun and interesting links:

From Inside Higher Ed comes this article, “Duke Analyzes iPod Project.” And, for the whole sha-bang, there’s this, the “Duke iPod First Year Experience.” Personally, I think the whole iPod give-away thing is kind of a gimmick, and kind of a strange one for a place like Duke, if you ask me. “Sure, tuition is a gazillion dollars here at Duke, but hey, you get a free iPod!”

As reported in the Inside Higher Ed piece, there are some things that aren’t too surprising: for example, the greatest use of the iPod was in foreign language and music classes, and there were many “inherent limitations” for using the iPod in teaching, such as tools for mixing audio with images.

But I was surprised about the problem of some of the sound quality of iPod recordings not being good enough to use. I have one of these $50 recording devices for my iPod and it seems to work fine to me. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I for one am interested in doing some podcasting sorts of things for an online class I’m teaching in the Fall; maybe they didn’t have much need for that at Duke.

I also think that iPods are useful (and might be useful for our students at EMU) simply as a portable hard drive. I haven’t tried to hook it up to a PC yet, but all I have to do to use it on a Mac is to plug it into an USB port. Very handy, if you ask me.

Of course, also easy to lose and/or steal, but that’s another story.

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So, who is at C&W?

Not me, I’m afraid. I already know I’m going to go to Texas Tech (well, I’m hoping/planning to go, at least), but alas, not to Stanford this year. So, out there in the blogosphere, who’s there?

  • It looks like Mike is….
  • Marcia is on her way…
  • I know Charlie is there because he’s doing a workshop I would have liked to have attended….
  • Okay, ah, anybody else? Anybody?

I’m sure there are more folks blogging this thing. Hopefully, they’ll make a link to some of these from the C&W Stanford homepage.

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Blog it legal!

Here’s a link to the EFF Legal Guid for Bloggers. I’ve talked plen-ty about the issues of privacy, blogging anonymously, and keeping your job and such, so I’m not going to write that much more about it now. So for now, just a link.

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Check out 30 Days… the show, that is…

The guy who made the movie Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock, has a show on right now (literally right now– I’m typing this during the show) on the FX Network called 30 Days. The premise of the show is pretty simple: what if you could live in someone else’s shoes for a month? What would that teach you about other peoples’ lives? In this premiere episode, Morgan and his fiancee Alex try to see what it’s like to live on minimum wage for a month. Or really, around minimum because Morgan (and I think Alex, too) manage to get jobs that are slightly higher than that. Future episodes (apparently) will feature folks other than Morgan and Alex in the role of “live this life for 30 days” person.

Oh, it turns out that Morgan has a blog.

Now, on the one hand, this episode does a good job of showing some of the obvious hardships on living on minimum wage. They live in a craptacular apartment, they are eating rice and beans for pretty much every meal, their jobs are horrible, and they end up going to the free clinic and emergency room because they don’t have health insurance.

On the other hand, there is an element of the way these two come across that seems awfully spoiled to me. As they point out at the beginning of the show, ol’ Morgan and Alex are living majorily high off the hog after the success of Supersize Me and beyond. So, in a couple places, they come across as big babies, sort of like Paris Hilton– okay, not that bad. Plus they have some significant bad luck with health issues and the like, the sort of thing that wouldn’t happen all the time. And really, I think that a lot of people who earn minimum wage do so temporarily, not for the rest of their lives.

I mean, I’ve lived poor before. When I was in my MFA program in the late 80s, I think I made about $6500 a year, and I defintely remember eating a lot of Cherios. When Annette and I were in our PhD programs together, I don’t think we ever made more than $25,000 between the two of us. Yeah, it’s hard, but you find ways to make it work.

And on the third hand, I read back a couple paragraphs and I think a) I’m getting to be one insensitive son of a bitch because it’s been quite a while since I’ve been close to that poor, b) this show and the idea of living on minimum wage puts the idea of “not having enough money” into perspective, and c) if I ended up somehow out of a job and having to get out there and take a minimum wage job like that, I’d be screwed in oh so many different ways.

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Revisiting diet and exercise….

I’ve been kind of stuck diet/exercise-wise for most of this month: I haven’t really gained any weight, but I haven’t lost any either, which is a shame because I had a particular weight goal in mind I wanted to reach by the time we left for our trip out west, a goal I’ll end up missing by 5 or so pounds. Oh well….

In any event, the end of spring teaching is near, and after our various end of June/beginning of July travels, I should be able to kind of ease into a more regular diet and exercise program. Here’s a run-down on some plans and goals:

  • Eat right, of course. I know (basically) what this means, though to be perfectly honest, I feel like I do pretty much “eat right” right now. Lotsa veggies, whole grains, lean meats, things like yogurt and high fiber cereal, olive oil instead of “bad fats” when I can, nuts, etc. I think I am pretty close to the sort of recommendations that are associated with the food pyramid or the Harvard eating plan or phase 2 of the South Beach diet, all of which are pretty much the same thing.

    Or let me put it this way: I eat as healthy of a diet as I am willing to eat and still enjoy my life, which includes the joy of good food. There’s always got to be some balance in these things. Julia Childs swore by butter and lived to be 95 or something like that.

  • Eat less. For me, I think not doing this has been my problem. I mean, if you eat boneless/skinless chicken breast that’s been grilled with some brocolli and a brown rice pilaf kind of thing but you eat enough of it to count as two adult servings, you’re not going to lose weight, period.
  • ASAP, I’m going to cancel my membership at the One-on-One gym in Ann Arbor and sign up for the Washtenaw County Recreation Center. This might not seem like a move in the right direction, but the main goal here is to save cash. The main reason why Annette and I signed up for One-on-One shortly after we moved here was because Annette wanted a place with a schedule for aerobics that worked for her. That’s all fine and good, but everything I do at the gym is things involving machines: weight machines, cardio machines, etc. I am unlikely to start taking exercise classes anytime soon.

    Anyway, after years of not thinking much about it, I realized that really, I don’t need to go to a place as expensive as One-on-One to do what I do. The Washtenaw County Rec Center is $170 a year for me, which is about a third of what it costs for a year for me at One-on-One. So I’m outta there, and given that the rec center has a pool and exercise classes, Annette might be out of One-on-One too.

  • You know, exercise more and stuff. While Will’s out of school, Annette and I will have some “day care issues” that will mean a not completely regular schedule for a workout, so the best that I think I will be able to do is get to the gym when I can and find exercise in other ways. But that’s something relatively easy to do in July and August around here: early walks, gardening, etc.

And then, when Will is back in school, I can kick into mucho workout mode. But more on that later.

What I’d like to accomplish by the end of the summer is to get back to the weight I was at when we went to Hawaii last year, about 10 pounds south of right now. I think it’s possible, but I think I’m going to have to do more than be on the “non-diet” diet I have been on.

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Hey! A presentation about me!

Well, no, not really.

But I received an email about the C&W Online Conference today about Collin Brooke’s presentation/essay/blog that’s part of the C&W Online format called “Weblogs as Deictic Systems” that suggested otherwise. Here’s a quote from the abstract:

Brooke writes that In his recent Kairos article “When Blogging Goes Bad,” Steven Krause suggests that the fit between weblogs and the writing classroom isn’t perhaps as seamless as we might wish it to be. His article recounts a “failed experiment” where weblogs failed to provide a “dynamic and interactive writing experience.” The presentation takes Krause’s article less as a “cautionary tale” and more as a challenge to understand where the friction between weblogs and the writing classroom is located.

To be honest, it’s flattering to be featured so prominently in an abstract like this, but that really isn’t what Collin’s piece is about, IMO. I think it’s a lot more complicated and interesting than that, and much more about some of the interesting dynamics of social networking. I really like this term “deixis” because it seems relevant to some things I’ve been thinking about in terms of the concept of “immediacy” as I think about it in my dissertation and as I’m thinking about trying to revisit in a different book project. And, perhaps more importantly (to me, at least), he talks about the ideas of “Centripetal/Centrifugal” forces and how that ultimately impacts the way that we write and interact with texts online.

Anyway, it’s an interesting and well-worth reading project. But it doesn’t really have much to do with me. I’m just happy that someone somewhere read my essay/blog in the first place….

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"Emerging Writing Technologies" search

Funny what you find when you’re not really looking for it. While trying to find something else with the search phrase “emerging writing technologies,” I found this essay by Jim Porter, “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale.” I’m linking it here because it just might help me to solve a problem I’ve been having with figuring out how to replace the “invent your own technology” assignment in my 328 class. Anyway, this post might only make sense to me, but Jim’s essay in pretty interesting.

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Sunday prewriting post (take 2)

I tried to post this earlier, but the flaky wireless connection I have in this coffee shop crapped out on me, so I’m trying again. Not that I have anything too profound to post; in fact, that was kind of the point of the previous post, that I don’t have much to say right now. But here’s a few thoughts before I get back to work:

  • Things seem to be kind of quiet to me on the blogs I read and various mailing lists, I guess because summer is (soon) upon us, and I also guess because of the upcoming Computers and Writing Conference, this year at Stanford. I decided quite a while ago that I could not afford to spend the time or money to make two trips to California this year, so I went to the CCCCs instead. In retrospect, because the CCCCs was cheaper than I thought it was going to be, I wish I was at C&W too. Oh well.
  • Dr. B posted about something called Conversate that I’ll have to check out at some point. One of the problems I’m having right now is sort of exemplified by this potentially useful tool: how do I write about writing tools available on the internet for a textbook that isn’t liable to come out for at least two years?
  • Mike has a funny post about an article in Inside Higher Education that you shouldn’t read. No, not Mike’s post– the article.
  • I find this funny because I remember this to be the case way back when.
  • I need to relocate to a coffee shop with a less flaky wireless connection; namely, Bombadill’s. The food and people watching are better in Ann Arbor, but the working conditions are actually better in Ypsi.
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Estabrook carnival fun (and the return of Annette)




Will in a barrel

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I meant to do this earlier, but Will and I have been busy today preparing for Annette’s return. Here’s a few highlights from day three and four of Annette on the road:

  • Will and I went to the video game store in the mall, and he bought the video game based on the movie Robots and I bought GranTurisimo 4, which is a driving game that is pretty freakin’ hard.
  • We went to the Estabrook end of the year carnival, which was a joy and a delight. Well, sorta. Actually, no. Dramatic weather rolled in and most of the activities were forced indoors. I found the thing kind of miserable, but Will seemed to like it. Here’s a link to a bunch of pictures.
  • Will and I ran various errands, which included a gelato stop, we had dinner, and then went to get Annette, who arrived safe and sound. She gave me a couple of snow globes, Will a t-shirt with a lot of bugs on it, and some sugary maple candy. She knows her boys…